


Rockabye

by fadagaski



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Babies, Birth, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, No Plot/Plotless, Trauma, War Rig Family Week, post-natal depression, tumblr ficlets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-08 09:53:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5492912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadagaski/pseuds/fadagaski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max and Furiosa have a baby, but the Wasteland is no place for children, and they're neither of them the picture of healthy, stable parents.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Announcement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [onceuponaprime](http://onceuponaprime.tumblr.com) asked: 12 "I think we need to talk" Furiosa and Max because I like to suffer.

One day without crossing paths is normal. Two days, the same. Three, even four, isn’t unheard of. But when Max counts back and realises he hasn’t seen Furiosa in the flesh for five days - and they’re both at Citadel with no pressing issues to trouble them - a knot of worry tightens in his gut.

“She’s in the gardens,” Toast says, a wrench in her hand and gritty oil up to her elbows, when he asks.

“She’s in the infirmary,” says Dag, her trowel plunging deep into black earth. Behind her, Cheedo chases after a giggling Leaf on his chubby toddler legs.

“She’s down in the garages,” says Capable as she unpicks the stitches in a Warboy’s arm. Bullet watches him with hooded eyes.

It’s at this point Max realises they’re giving him the run around, and gives up. If Furiosa doesn’t want to see him, that’s fine. He can respect her decision.

But the rest of the day drags slowly by. He’s a creature of habit, living always one step in the past. It’s so easy to get lost in his head, recounting their past interactions, looking for a reason. Guilt wraps around his chest, makes it difficult to breathe. Shadows flitter at the edges of his vision for the first time in months.

She had seemed happy. The last time he saw her. The two of them side by side on her bed, one of the few times he had managed to stay the night through, just watching and breathing. His muscles ached from the day before but, when she pulled him closer, he couldn’t help but go, and her lips were soft and pure, and her skin deliciously cool under his fingers, and she always made the best noises.

Max is in no mood to sit in the hall at mealtime with everyone else, not without Furiosa as buffer and distraction. He grabs a plate and heads up, no destination in mind, and finds himself on the swaying bridge between the central mesa and the garage tower. It’s a long drop, and the creak and shift of the bridge makes his stomach lurch bad enough that eating is difficult, but he’s far away from everyone without having to actually leave.

He doesn’t want to leave. But if that’s what she wants …

The wind whistles by. The sky stains red with the dying sun. Max swings his legs back and forth and broods.

“Max.”

He glances up, eyebrows raised. Furiosa waits for his nod before she approaches, hand skating over the rope-rail, her footsteps confident despite the swing of the bridge. She pauses a few feet from him. Her face is pinched with tension. She looks paler than usual. Anxiety squeezes Max’s heart in a vice.

Furiosa takes a deep breath. “I think we need to talk,” she says.

She rests her flesh hand over her belly.


	2. The Father

He’s still shaking, is the thing. Not little tremors but full-body wracking jolts, all his muscles fitzing and sparking, caught up in the maelstrom of mixed messages spitting out of his nervous system. 

Freeze. 

Fight. 

Flee.

Furiosa has collapsed sideways, panting so fast she’s close to hyperventilating. He wants to do something about that, wants to help, but he’s stuck in this limbo beside the bed, and everything hurts and he might be sick and he can’t stop _shaking_. 

There’s that wailing, gurgling cry that haunts his darkest nights. Max spasms, pinwheels backwards into the wall, but no one notices. They’re all smiling, crowding around Capable and the cargo in her arms.

Furiosa lets go his hand. Her grip transcended pain so long ago his fingers have gone numb. 

“It’s a boy,” Capable says, turning to them, beaming from ear to ear. She has blood smeared past the elbows, sweat sheening her face, but she looks giddy with relief. 

The baby is still crying. 

Max meets her eyes, skitters away, couldn’t say anything even if he knew the words. Everything is locked up tight inside him. Capable frowns mildly at him, looks instead at Furiosa still curled and aching on the blood-soaked bed. 

“Let’s sit you up, Furiosa,” she says. “Then you can hold him.”

Furiosa shakes her head fiercely, jaw clenched so hard the tendons are a clear line under her pale skin. “No,” she snarls. Max shrinks against the wall. _Freeze fight flee_ screech his instincts, uselessly.

Capable freezes, perhaps as instinctive as Max’s reaction.

“You-you don’t want to hold him?” Cheedo pipes up from behind. Furiosa jerks her head again, hand twisted white-knuckled in the sheets. 

“You should hold him,” Capable argues, trying for firm but betrayed by a small quaver in her voice. 

“I will _not_ ,” Furiosa growls, more threatening for the quiet tone. 

The baby is still crying, that awful wail that grates on the eardrums. Max grits his teeth, swallows against the rising crowd of voices swimming in his head. He - he needs to get out of here. 

_Freeze fight **flee**_. 

“Well, we need to clean you up,” Toast declares from Capable’s right side. “Max can hold him.” 

Max looks up, wild with panic, _no no no he **can’t**_ but Capable dumps the squalling baby in his shaking shaking arms and there is still blood and mucus and whatever else smearing over his hands and the baby is tiny and the muscles shift under his skin and Max has _done this_ and it _broke him_ and -

It’s not peace that washes over him. It’s a terror so monumental, so all-encompassing that it literally steals the air from his lungs. He can’t move, can’t think, his mind is a raging storm and he is trapped at its mercy.

_freezefightfleefreezefightflee_

He doesn’t know how long he holds the baby in his unreliable arms. Doesn’t know when he started rocking, just a little, tiny movements just to feel like he’s doing something. He’s barely aware of the struggle in the bed, Furiosa nauseous with bloodloss and murderously weak when she births the placenta. 

The baby quiets.

Hours - months - _years_ later, Max looks up. It seems strange to see the banal clinic. Capable is changing Furiosa’s clothing with Toast’s help, but Cheedo is watching him. She smiles.

“He likes you.”

Max dies a little inside.


	3. The Mother

Furiosa doesn’t really realise at first, because birth is agony even on the scale of a person who _cut off her own fucking arm_ and it takes a month at least for her to screw her head on right after _flashbacks_ and _nightmares_ and _painkillers_ and _so much blood_ , but eventually she’s present enough to realise she’s getting an awful lot of sleep for a new mother with a baby in the room. 

But one morning, when her bladder’s up before the sun, she crawls out of a bed dim with warmth. Max has been so careful around her, cuddling close or beating a retreat, reading her signs like she’s a desert storm toeing the horizon. This morning she misses him with an ache in her throat that _hurts_. 

The crib’s empty too. She notices that.

He isn’t far. Just outside the door, in fact, close enough to hear if Furiosa needs him. He turns slightly, catches her eye. The baby is curled in the nook of his arm and he is rocking, rocking, rocking. 

When Capable pulled the pudgy, blood-streaked thing from between her thighs, Furiosa nearly vomited. Dizzy with blood loss, she refused to hold it. Max was there. He cradled it so gingerly he might have dropped it. Furiosa probably wouldn’t have cared.

Now she looks at Max swaying with their baby and she feels … something. Something that isn’t numbness or pain or sheer unadulterated fucking **rage**. She stands beside him, peers over his shoulder at the soft round face, the tiny nose and the poppy-red mouth, the sweep of golden lashes on a sleep-flush cheek. 

Max clears his throat. “Was thinking,” he starts. There’s a tight quality to his tone, a _guzz running dry tone_ , a _down to the last bullets_ tone. His eyes, when she looks at them, are wide like a startled animal. Has he been this close to the edge for so long? How didn’t she see? 

“Haven’t got a name for him yet,” Max says.

Furiosa steels herself, raises a hand and runs a finger over the crown of the baby’s head. Feels Max’s shoulder melt under her resting chin. Swallows thick against the ache in her throat.

“Yeah,” she says


	4. Craving Salt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [silver-89](http://silver-89.tumblr.com) asked: 3. "Please, don't leave." Max/Furiosa

He shows up after she's already rolled the bike out from its hiding place, when she's sat on it - gingerly, fucking hell childbirth hurts for weeks afterwards - and the moon is bright and all the world is asleep ... except him.

"Please don't leave," he murmurs. She heard him coming, but his voice still makes her flinch. She won't glance back to look at him. She keeps her eye on the horizon, where star-speckled black meets the warping silver dunes. Nothing out there but space and time. Nothing but salt. 

"Furiosa. Please. Stay."

The anger strikes like lightning, igniting the tinderbox inside her. She grips the handlebars to keep from lashing out. "You have no right to ask me that!" she snarls into the distance. 

There's a pause. A shuffle of feet on sand, cloth on cloth. 

Then the baby starts crying.

Furiosa closes her eyes, swallows thick against the lump swelling in her throat. Her breasts ache at the miserable mewling sound. She thinks she might be leaking. 

"Please." He's moved next to her; she can't see him but his heat is an undeniable wall, his smell a mix of oil and leather and milk. It's half comforting, half cloying. 

Furiosa grinds her teeth. "I can't do this. Don't ask me to."

The baby keeps keening. Max shushes it, ineffective. Furiosa's shirt grows more wet at the nipples. 

"I know. I'm sorry. But." His hand brushes her shoulder, a featherlight touch that prickles in a flush of goosebumps. "Furiosa."

Her eyes open of their own volition. To her left Max stands bare-chested, baby cradled in his arms as he bounces. He's in the soft sleep pants he wears. He's barefoot. Furiosa shakes her head and closes her eyes again.

"I can't. I can't."

She starts the engine. The baby squeaks and wails louder. 

"I'm sorry." 

The night embraces her. She doesn't look back.


	5. Hope

Max rides into Citadel at the front of the convoy, hauling a fuckload of guzzoline from Gas Town. He’s wearing the tiniest smile, just a hint to reveal the warm glow inside him. It’s been two days - fucking negotiations, he is so not made for this shit, and thank fuck for Toast and Cheedo doing all the hard work - but he’s finally -

Home.

The Dag greets them at the base of the central tower, sweeps Cheedo into her arms with a bubbly kiss. Max rolls the kinks out of his neck and shoulders, and hops out of the cab of the Rig. 

It’s a beautiful day, the shine not rubbed off at all by Toast bellowing orders at the Boys circling the Rig. Max watches them leap into action, feeling unaccountably fond. 

“Hey,” says a voice he knows so well, and he knew she was coming before she said anything but it still sends a little shiver of happiness tingling down his spine. 

“Hey,” he answers, turns. She has the baby in the sling Capable fashioned for her, but that doesn’t stop him from pressing his sweaty forehead to hers, eyes closed, mind peaceful. 

Home.

“Look,” Furiosa murmurs. Max opens his eyes, follows the direction of her gaze to the baby.

“Huh,” he says. 

His son is smiling at him, blue eyes shining with recognition.

He has dimples.


	6. Neith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [LOOK AT THIS ART](http://socially-awkward-libra.tumblr.com/post/131603176642) BY [@socially-awkward-libra](http://socially-awkward-libra.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [LOOK AT THIS ART](http://youkaiyume.tumblr.com/post/135678748278/youkaiyume-just-the-beginning-of-maxfuriosa) BY [@youkaiyume](http://youkaiyume.tumblr.com/)
> 
> LOOK AT HOW LUCKY I AM!!!!!

No one knows there’s been an incursion until gunshots ricochet down the corridors. 

Toast goes running, of course, a gun in each hand and orders bellowing from her mouth. A dozen War Boys scramble after her whooping and cheering. They race up the stairs, drawn like magnets to the sounds of fighting.

Wheeling round a corner, Toast catches sight of an invader crawling through the window. The black clothing explains why none of the sentries spotted them - black clothes, rare and expensive, this isn’t an opportunistic raid but a financed operation - but there’s kerosene light in the corridor and Toast squeezes off a shot that splatters blood and brain matter across the wall.

Already someone else is trying to creep through the same hole. “Shoot them down!” Toast shouts. Her Boys spring forward.

More shots boom from a room to the left. Toast spins, heart thumping, realizes that that’s Furiosa’s room and she can hear the baby shrieking over the noise of gunfire.

“To the Imperator!” Toast screams. 

“Imperator!” the Boys echo.

It’s only a few meters to the door, but it seems to take a lifetime. Toast dreads what she will see when she gets there. The baby is alive. That will have to suffice.

She kicks the door open, guns swinging up, and the sight inside is breath-taking.

Furiosa stands in the centre of the room, blood streaking down her head, sobbing baby braced against her shoulder and her half-arm cupping him. In the other, she wields a pump-action shotgun. There is murder on her face.

Toast watches, mesmerized, as Furiosa fires at the person climbing through the window, flips the gun into her hand for a forceful pump, flips it back and fires again at the next intruder. 

There are seven dead bodies pooling blood in great shiny puddles. Furiosa is surrounded by a semi-circle of bullet casings and discarded weapons. Her breast hangs outside her shirt from feeding her son.

No one else tries to enter through the window. Furiosa drops the shotgun, soothes the crying baby with gentle pats to his shoulder from her gunpowder-stained hand. 

“All good?” she asks Toast without looking. 

“We’ll see,” Toast answers.

At that moment there is a burst of noise: shattering glass and booming explosives and screaming women. 

Furiosa grabs the baby sling draped over the end of the bed, tosses it on one-handed and scoots the baby inside. Then she slides a pistol from its hiding place under the bed.

She meets Toast’s eyes, fervor and fury gleaming like fire out of her own.

“Let’s go,” she barks.

They go.

**Author's Note:**

> [Join me on Tumblr for more Mad Max mayhem](http://fadagaski.tumblr.com/).


End file.
